Howl (2015)

We meet our main man immediately, who is a British train guard who is sad that he was just declined a supervisor position, and is running the midnight to 2am train to nowheresville instead. He hates his job and everyone on the train (because they're awful), and they hate him back (because they're awful). He gives us a Chihuahua-based jump scare in the first few minutes to get us ready for wolves.

The sound mix is weird. Not sure if it's just my copy, but the music is much louder than everything else. If I turn it up so I can hear the conversation, I have to listen to generic film soundtrack at 120dB. I split the difference and watched it with subtitles. Luckily before the Chihuahua event, else I might have hearing damage.

His CG-rendered train hurdles through the night under a full moon. While he naps in the employee compartment, it jolts off of the track and comes screeching to a halt. Rather than running around in a panic, he walks very, very, very slowly through the darkness. He checks on the passengers, who mostly yell at him as if he is is personally at fault.

The driver, who went out to check the tracks, is splattered across the window by a two-legged wolf creature.

The passengers want to hop off of the train and walk to the next station. He reluctantly lets them out into the misty forest. The crooked camera angle lets us know its unsafe. That, and when they stumble across the driver's corpse and a wolf howls nearby.

After running back to the train, they close the door on the slow old lady's (subtitles: "glamorous lady") leg even though they haven't actually seen the danger yet, which seems a bit unreasonable. Though they weren't entirely wrong, and the danger eats her leg. It's one of those films where people mostly just scream and panic for an hour and a half while the main guy uselessly radios for help, i.e. any given zombie film.

The wolf creature definitely walks on two legs, and runs its sharp claws along the train menacingly, implying it's humanoid with malintent. The old lady saw it and suspensefully informs them, "it wasn't an animal. It was more like… a man." That's when the unidentified sounds start coming from farther down the train. It's just the fat guy who they had left behind.

A cell phone rings, and they struggle to figure out which one of them owns the ringing phone, as people so often do. While they fight about it, the girl with the ringing phone is sucked out of the window by the wolf beast. Only her phone had the magic signal, because that's how cellular reception works.

One of the older passengers convinces them to mount a defense by sealing all of the windows by screwing conveniently available metal plates over them with all the power tools that the train stocks in its secret power tool compartment, so they spend one brief scene constructing an over-the-top anti-wolf fortress in one of the cars.

The severely damaged "glamorous lady" starts exhibiting symptoms that are not consistent with a leg bite, such as projectile vomiting teeth. The wolf comes into the toilet through the ceiling, which means their fortress probably isn't going to hold.

A wolf breaks through their defenses, looking more like a long-haired body builder with fangs than a wolf, but they stab it to death with a crowbar. It's too early for the movie to be over, so it's obviously not over. They correctly identify it as a werewolf, then look expectantly to their "glamorous lady." An old man on the train tells about how long ago there was a train crash in these woods, and all the passengers were mangled or vanished by the time the train was found. British werewolves mostly hunt trains.

With the wolf dead, they hop out to try to fix the train. What luck, there's a kid who knows about train engines and operations onboard. But, you know, wolves move in packs. The glamorous lady on board goes yellow-eyed smiley zombie and eats her husband.

They get picked off one-by-one and only the virgin lives.